Clinton Melton

Clinton Melton, 33, a gas station attendant and father of four, was shot and killed at the station where he worked in Glendora on December 3, 1955 — four months after Emmett Till was murdered twenty miles away, and in the same county. Melton had argued with a white customer, Elmer Otis Kimbell, over how much gas Kimbell had been pumped; a witness said Kimbell announced he was going home to get a shotgun and would return to kill Melton. The station owner told Melton to leave before Kimbell came back, but Kimbell returned first and shot Melton, who was unarmed and sitting in his own car, in the hand and head. Kimbell, who was using the car of his close friend J.W. Milam — one of the two men who had killed Till and been acquitted weeks earlier in the same courthouse — was tried for murder before another all-white Tallahatchie County jury and acquitted, despite the testimony of witnesses who saw the shooting and a doctor whose exam of Kimbell's own wound cast doubt on his self-defense claim. Less than three weeks after the shooting and just before the trial, Melton's widow Beulah drowned when her car went into Black Bayou with two of their children in the back seat; a family member said everyone in the community believed her car had been forced off the road. The DOJ's Civil Rights Division reviewed the case decades later and closed it, since Kimbell, by then deceased, had already stood trial and been acquitted at the state level.

Glendora, MS · Tallahatchie County

• 1955: Case opens — victim reported missing or found.
• Documented milestones (renewed investigation, media coverage, family advocacy) to be added as sourced.
• Present: case remains unresolved. No named suspect has been convicted.

• Victim identity, background, and the December 3, 1955 date and circumstances, per the DOJ's public case file and PBS FRONTLINE's “Un(re)solved” case summary.
• Elmer Otis Kimbell was tried for murder and acquitted by an all-white jury; the DOJ's later review closed the case without further action since Kimbell was deceased and had already faced state trial.

• No one was ever convicted in Melton's killing.
• The circumstances of Beulah Melton's fatal car crash, widely believed in the community to have been no accident, were never formally investigated as connected to her husband's case.

• U.S. Department of Justice — Notice to Close File
• PBS FRONTLINE Un(re)solved — case summary
• Project Cold Case
• Murder Accountability Project
• NamUs